My Stationery Origin Story

For me, my lifelong love of stationery is bound up with my lifelong love of writing.

I was an avid reader as a child, and this eventually morphed into a wish to tell my own stories. I wasn’t too picky about the stationery I used as a kid, it was just a tool to capture my imagination. I remember scribbling stories in pencil, or with cheap Biros in exercise books and spiral bound notebooks. 

As I got a bit older, computers became more commonplace (I’m really aging myself here!), and I found that with some practice, I could type much faster than I could handwrite, and I mostly switched to writing on the computer. However, I still enjoyed the back to school season, and an excuse to buy cute stationery. 

This continued into early adulthood. I studied at college, then university, so had an excuse to continue buying notebooks and pens, although I always bought more than I could ever reasonably use. If I saw a cute notebook in a supermarket or office supply store, I absolutely had to have it!  

But it was only in October 2023, when I bought my first fountain pen that I truly fell into the stationery rabbit hole. My first fountain pen was a Lavender Kaweco Sport, and it was just something I stumbled upon on Amazon.

I loved the unusual design, but was nervous about trying a fountain pen. I had always thought they seemed a bit finicky, and would be easy to smudge, but I decided to give the Kaweco Sport a try, even if at the time paying £25 for a single pen felt crazy.

I tried it, loved it, and upon looking it up online found that there were millions of colour options available. This led to me watching Youtube videos of people showing off their extensive Kaweco collections, which in turn led to me watching general fountain pen collection videos. 

These videos opened my eyes to the huge range of fountain pens available, and of course, I wanted to try them all. In quick succession I completed the trio of popular beginner fountain pens, adding a Lamy Safari and TWSBI Eco to my collection, and from there it spiralled. 

I bought pen after pen, and since I needed something to write with them all, I started journaling, a practice that has been pretty life changing for me.

I also moved back to handwriting a lot of my stories, and found that it helped to slow down and think more carefully about what I was writing. It also helped to write things out by hand first, because by the time I had my first draft on the computer it had already been through one round of editing. 

By January 2024, I was a fountain pen addict, and starting to discover the world of inks. I was also an enthusiastic lurker in the online stationery community, and wanted to be a part of it. But I’ve never been much of a social media person, and I’m too shy to talk to a camera for a Youtube or TikTok video. 

Since I loved writing, and already had several years experience as a blogger, I decided to start a blog, and so Inky Imaginings was born. I’ve been chatting about stationery here on my little corner of the internet since, and it’s been amazing to meet so many people, discover some great blogs, and interesting stationery. 

My immersion in the online stationery world has definitely led me down even more stationery rabbit holes, including paper, notebooks, travelers notebooks, planners, ring planners, stickers and washi tape. And I’ve got to be honest: if I’d known how much I’d spend on a single pen or single ring binder back when I was buying cheap notebooks from the supermarket, I’d probably have died of shock! I’d also likely have been baffled to learn that there’s such a thing as pen shows, and stationery festivals.

But do I have any regrets about my extensive collection of beautiful pens and notebooks? Absolutely not! They are treasured possessions that bring me joy, and for me, they encourage creativity because I’m excited to use them. 

Before I got so deep into stationery, I didn’t even have a desk to write at, I just wrote with a laptop on my lap on the sofa. Now I’ve carved out a space in my home for my desk and I get to write in a place where I’m surrounded by the things that I love, and that make me want to write and create things. 

To a lot of people, stationery items are just tools, they are just things. But to me, they’ve become something much more.

So I’d love to know, what’s your stationery origin story? Have you always loved stationery, or has it been a more recent interest of yours?